So much theater without an audience. For crissakes, how are we supposed to vote for people representing us, who are voting on things for us, that we haven't a clue about? How do they represent us, on our positions on policy, if the policy is an absolute secret? Even if all of congress knew everything, and these people obviously didn't, how can we have an offshoot of government working independently without any input from citizenry who pay for it?

More likely, the layers of secrets allows them to speak blandly about what they're doing, knowing that congress was not elected for it's intelligence.

Basically, you take your top secret information, feed it into a mass dilution device, and out comes public information. Although congress should have the security clearance, that doesn't matter if the NSA/whoever goes out of their way to obfuscate the information.

Wow, misrepresentation via out of context quotes ahoy. Schneier said "…it's extremely freaky that Congress has such a difficult time getting information out of the NSA that they have to ask me", and "Surreal part of setting up this meeting…".

On the meeting itself, he just says that it was "candid and interesting". But I guess that's too boring…

I am really, really glad that my Representative was there - one of the few bright points about living in Richmond, VA is we have a really stellar group of Congressmen. Between Rep. Bobby Scott, Sen. Tim Kaine, and Sen. Mark Warner, I feel kind of guiltily happy, compared to a lot of the rest of the country...